Galatians 1:10
by hewhoistomriddle
Summary: "Obviously, I am not trying to win the approval of people but of God." Bible-fics, mostly on women and minor characters.
1. Delilah

When I first tried to write Bible fanfiction, I was pretty much a heretic. Mysteriously, a huge load of abysmal luck got dumped on me. This is my second time, and this time it's when I'm pretty much a Jesus freak. I deeply apologize if any of these seem offensive, it's not meant to be.

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**Delilah**

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_"You are my sweetest downfall." - _Samson, Regina Spektor

****  
In the end, when all the ashy bitter lies are flicked away, it remains that she loved him,_ loves him still_.

Even if she'd feared it at first – being as self-involved as she was - this thing that bore too close a resemblance to love: fluttery at times, deep at others, and so very debilitating thoughout. She'd tried hard not to marvel at everything he was. His integrity. His goodness. The faith that seemed like silvery truth shining in his eyes, impervious to doubt, untouchable by malice. How nimble his fingers were when he'd spun a crown of wildflowers around her head, when they capable of ill-famed strength.

_Fall in love, rend your heart_, this is what Delilah believed in and lives by. But how could she not fall in love when, despite her gentile heritage, he'd loved her _entirely_, without guile and without a splinter of hesitation. They hadn't warned her enough of how the good things and the good people always pull you in with elemental force, no matter the level and hue of your reluctance.

~.~

Delilah thinks they look upon her with disdain as she gather the unblinking coins – eleven shekels of silver for his hair – in her shawl, deception like a dark and slippery sheath snaking circles around her soul. Despite however much she helped them, she was still a treacherous, faithless woman.

She wonders if they knew she loved him (_he _knew; he'd whispered an accusing _you've fallen in love with me_ close to her ear, aghast, as if it were the greater crime) and she wonders if they damned her twice for that.

~.~

She sits surrounded by rulers and hedonists and _cowards_, the richest banquet before them, paid for in full by the life and dignity of a man beyond reproach, and Delilah cannot eat. She looks instead where they chain Samson to be presented, laughed at and mocked, his hair dangling in sweat-slicked tendril like arteries cropped short. Her face falls when she sees his eyes gouged out, her heart breaks with the fiercest of guilt. Between ivory pillars high as heaven, his figure stands as if reaching bodily towards a glorious vista far above, crowned by light. His lips move in a fervent prayer to the air.

He shouts his final words - sealing the fate of three thousand people, hers, and his own - the timbre of his voice carried by slashes of quaking earth, and Delilah's feet refuse to move as Philistines run and furniture upends and the world turns to chaos around her. She looks to Samson's face, would've met his gaze, and stands still as if buoyed, an odd sense of peace settling on her.

She should've known someone would hold her accountable. She's even grateful for it.

There are no more exits and the roof falls in like an arch of sky falling. Samson is lost in the glittering debris.

Delilah knows his god will save him. She wonders if her own would be so kind._  
_


	2. Rahab

**Rahab, The Prostitute**

_She'll commit treason to help strangers._

**

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**  
The night she takes her place in history starts the same as any, laden with smoke and spice and and dance and men with golden hands, and ends with her facing two desperate fugitives with stalwart eyes offering her the choice of a lifetime.

~.~

Rahab hadn't always been a prostitute. It had been due to circumstance – which, even so, doesn't completely justify the choice – beneath that, she was a woman as good as any, fiercely loving of her family, equally loving of secrets. Flighty. Noncommittal. What set her apart, probably, was that she had a streak so good that while she'll never promise anything, she'll commit treason to help strangers breaching their territories.

She remembers the coarse flax she'd been drying on the rooftops and takes them there, hides them, protects them with an infantry of lies and a few coquettish looks. The soldiers take to the river, in the direction where she points them, on the scent of a trail that had never been strewn.

~.~

When Rahab was young, her parents had been frightened of how painfully intelligent she'd shown herself to be, calculating sums and reading people. She'd saved her father from many a tenuous barter, in a way that was rude and invasive for a girl, in that era. Her father had told her to stop it. She'd persisted. Her mother clapped both hands to Rahab's face and said, with resigned finality, "It's useless, Rahab. There's nothing you can do." It was quick and clean, like the snapping of wrists. Rahab never tried to negotiate after that.

~.~

She can't sleep for a silent scream in her head. She knows who the men sleeping on the rooftop are. Rumors had abound in the marketplace and in the streets: _God's people_. Crossers of the Red Sea. Survivors of the plagues of mighty Egypt. She realizes immediately she'll never be granted another chance. She goes up to the roof and fiddles with her hands, suddenly awkward with them, makes a gesture as if asking how to exact a promise.

"Ask what you may," One of them says, surprisingly kind.

"Swear to me that you will show kindness to my family and all who belong to me because I have shown you kindness." _All who belong to me_, is an unnatural phrase on her lips, but she'll save all she can. The men exchange looks she can easily read, and assent. They give her a cord the color of blood to hang out her window. Come morning, she sends them on their way and they leave without a backwards glance.

~.~

She hangs the scarlet cord, holds to that covenant – a paltry solace, a _pittance_, for a girl of a people God didn't choose - and is given due respite when the walls of the city fall and the Isrealites invade.


	3. Dinah

******Dinah**

_Privileged beyond compare._

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Dinah was born daughter of Israel, the jewel of her father's house, and that meant she is privileged beyond compare: her future awash with light, limitless, full of the promises God himself had sworn to her forefathers. And she was beautiful, even without the many bejeweled robes her four mothers lavish upon her. And, ultimately, this and love – the type of love that gives her shivers even in the warm sandy wind – will be her downfall.

Shechem was dark-haired and olive-skinned and sweet like a venomous flower. Of a powerful family. She'd loved him, simply, purely, the only way she'd ever known how even in a house sometimes of angry and bitter rivalries.

He came and wooed and took her. And shattered her faith in every good thing in the world.

~.~

What she remembers: Soundless explosions. Metallic points. _Foolish girl_. Behind them, the sunset painting the sprawling lands and lush hillsides a bloody cerise, the hue of tragedies. The day dying, and the life she has known dying with it. A blinding, searing, despairing rage and only one thought ringing clear in her consciousness: _These are things that happen to other people. These are things that happen to other people. These are things that happen to other people._ She repeats it so many times, in harsh choking sobs, but it doesn't change anything, nor does it offer a modicum of comfort.

~.~

And he'd had the gall to tell her _I love you_.

And_ marry me_.

~.~

Her family heard, and needed only to look at her to confirm it: her lush mouth turned downwards, eyes hysterical, their black bags only making them ever more startling.

Dinah needs someone to say the right thing – _she doesn't know what _- her father's God would know those fleeting magical words that would soothe her soul like a wraparound balm, but He is painfully, _horrifically _silent, as though all her faculties attuned to Him were suddenly swaddled with wool. Her brothers – strong Judah and pensive Levi, brutal Simeon and charismatic Zebulun, even quiet clever Joseph with eyes large and sad, who's always been loved best and who doesn't completely understand what happened – all of them rise in grief and fury for her.

But none of them say the right thing.

They take revenge instead.

~.~

She remembers, once, Simeon and Judah had brought to dance with the Hivites around a bonfire. In the center of that red blaze: splintered wood and canes, boxes, charring to black. Embers glowing. Black smoke rising, wisps curling into faces that howl as if in agony.

Against the dying light, when her brother's plans come to fruition, the city looks just like that, going up in flames.**  
**


	4. Esther

**Hadassah**

_She's not Esther. Believing doesn't come so easily._

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The night before she goes to the king, Hadassah – _Hadassah, not Esther, because Esther is the brave and faithful and glorious one, whereas Hadassah goes weak-kneed with fear_ – thinks about the events and people that transpired to bring her here, guided by an unknown hand for an unfathomable purpose.

She had been but a girl when Mordecai first brought her to this foreign land of many luxuriant riches. An orphan uprooted from everything she had ever known, of little worth; her beauty exquisite but not quite grown into, merely an awed face in a crushing crowd. Now, she stands as queen of the empire, reaped from thousands upon thousands, the jewel of the harvest. Clad in silken robes that felt decadent on her skin. Atop a balcony of cool white marble, the vast night sky above, the network of civilization below.

For all these, she doesn't feel much different.

Still lost.

Still fearful.

Still looking out for a home that will last forever.

~.~

_Home_, is what she finds when makes her final sacrifice: her life given freely without certainty of recompense. Her head bowed and soul stripped bare and free of earthly trappings.

Her gaze is lost in the clear, aquamarine oceans under the surface of the sapphires adorning the king's - her husband's - hand. Brilliant glimmers shine off the surface of the water in the shape of the stars of David and she feels God with her, holding her hand. Faith made her beautiful, faith gave her strength, now faith felt like an armor on her soul – Hadassah's never felt safer.

_God is her home_, she realizes, _had always been_.

Esther, she thinks, knew it all along.

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_"For I know well the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. When you seek me with all your heart, you will find me. I will gather you and bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile._"  
- Jeremiah 29: 11-14.


	5. Yocheved

******Yocheved**

_Remember me._

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She doesn't know God the way her forefathers did, but some nights as she lies beneath a canopy of stars, entirely in awe of the universe, she imagines them years into the past, children beloved and unforsaken, living as free men blessed with milk and honey, wine and wheat and desert figs, flocks under their hand, unconquerable by enemies, God's hand warm like eternal sunshine on their spirits, all the world their inheritance.

She pulls wisps from those dreams, inscribe on her skin, and turns them to words like a forgotten prayer under her breath, a catalog of wishes.

_Remember me, remember me, remember me, and deliver my people_.

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_River, O River flow gently for me  
this precious cargo you bear  
deliver him somewhere  
where he can live free  
and River, deliver him back_  
- River Lullaby, Prince of Egypt OST


End file.
